X-Files aside, the UN is finally making “official” what everyone has known for ages: we are currently living through one of the Great Extinctions of life on this planet. So far five have been found in the fossil record, so that makes this the Sixth Extinction.
May you live in interesting times indeed. I wonder what class of animals will take over on the top of the food chain after us mammals expire? My money’s on lawyers.
Foreign Affairs has a nice Sharon backgrounder, which puts a lot of stuff into context:
His current policy of hitting PA installations to retaliate for terror attacks on Israelis developed in the 1950s, when the prime minister, “B.G.,” would send Sharon to attack police stations in the West Bank. Then, as now, Israel believed that humiliating its Arab enemies would pressure them into curbing terror attacks. In both cases, this strategy has had mixed results: in the 1950s, Israel’s retaliations inflamed the regional arms race and eventually led to the Sinai war of 1956, which was followed by a decade of relative quiet. In recent years, meanwhile, retaliations against the PA have had little positive effect.
Weird echoes of the last time a car bomb removed an enemy of Ariel Sharon. This time, a car bomb in Beirut killed the son of the leader of an anti-Israel group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Not to be confused with the more tersely named Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, of course. Any references to the Life of Brian are banned.
Anyway, it seems that when Palestinians use bombs to attack Israelis, that’s terrorism, but when the Israeli secret services (surely the most likely perps here) use the same tactics, it’s usually ignored. It’s not just me, the BBC seems to think the most likely suspects are the Israelis as well. It seems none of the factions in the Middle East have much concern for humanity.
So like pretty much every regular military commander before him faced with a guerilla war (in this case, commanding the Brits in Afghanistan against the “Al Qaeda/Taliban “AQT”) Brigadier Roger Lane has complained that the AQT are “not showing a predisposition to reorganise and regroup to mount offensive operations against us”. They just won’t come out to play.
Spotting “Taliban targets” is apparently difficult. Some sources say the current Operation Condor began when the Americans bombed a wedding party that was shotting its AK-47s into the air as a salute and now, of course, you’ve got pissed-off Afghans and Westerners hunting each other through the mountains.
Anthony Loyd, the Times correspondent, concluded recently that if you carry a weapon in the wrong part of Afghanistan and point it at one of the coalition special forces, you will inevitably die quickly and once you’ve been shot, you are AQT by definition. Given that half the male Afghan population is armed, and used to using weapons liberally, there is ample scope for shooting shepherds.
So this klepto steals a billion dollars of art, and will get a pretty light sentence. Admittedly, his chances improved because his mother destroyed all the artwork evidence. Not many people (except dotcom CEOs) can claim to have flushed away a billion dollars. Anyway, then I read that this guy gets 16 years for stealing a Snickers bar. He should have gone for the Old Masters!
This is a really especially well written article from Charles Glass, the Middle East writer. He points out that Arafat has survived military actions against him by an array of Middle Eastern leaders. Over the past few decades all these people have at one time or another tried to eliminate him:
Yet he keeps on surviving. When he’s under attack, he becomes a De Gaulle figure to many Palestinians. When escaping, he imitates Harry Houdini. Yet his escapes usually involve the sacrifice of many Palestinians, or their aspirations. In these moments of accommodation with his regional rivals, he becomes more like a P?tain, the French World War 1 hero who agreed to administrate Vichy France for the Germans during World War 2.
For seven years, Arafat was the Palestinian P?tain. Sharon’s violent policies transformed him for a moment into De Gaulle. Palestinians in Ramallah cheered the man who stood up to the Israeli bombardment. One week later, the refugees in Jenin booed the man who jailed dissenters, tortured opponents, protected the settlements and allowed his officials carte blanche to steal.
It’s been a while since I had a bestiality story, but this one has it all:
Enraged by finding his partner in a sexual act with a dog, a Westport man grabbed a sawn-off shotgun and tried to drag the animal outside to shoot it … McKenzie and the woman were members of a skinhead group, The Fourth Reich, living in “an ignorant and dangerous twilight world of hate, white supremacy, and latent violence”.
What is it about Nazis and dogs?
So with all this current hoopla about whether or not the Bush Gang should have done more to thwart the attack on the WTC, given the reports from field agents, it is perhaps interesting to note that last summer Ashcroft broke with FBI tradition and started flying privately, rather than taking commercial airliners.
I saw this great satire on Slashdot:
It was one year ago today that the Death Star, perhaps the greatest symbol of the Empire’s might, was destroyed in an attack by fanatic Rebels, who used small, single-person crafts to infiltrate seemingly impenetrable defenses. Thousands of mourners were on hand to remember and pay tribute to the victims and their families.
Everyone is descended from royalty, apparently.
This seems trivial when you think of it in terms of exponential powers of two. A thousand years ago, for example, each of us has this many direct living ancestors:
2^50
or
281474976710656
Obviously there weren’t that many people alive then, so there’s been a lot of cousin marriage in everyone’s families. these seems to surprise a lot of people.
Genealogical data is suspect because of its very subjective nature. People always want to find royals, and royals/upper classes are over-represented in historical records. But what’s written down on paper doesn’t always represent sweaty, dripping reality.
Sociology often uses the idea of genetic paternity to trace “human copulatory behaviour”. In anonymous testing, and differentiated according to culture, you regularly find that somewhere between 5-15% of individuals do not in fact share genetics with their assumed birth fathers. This is per generation. Extrapolate this over a few centuries and you find that horndogging humans have made a mockery of even the most carefully recorded genealogies.
This is from the charmingly titled Human Sperm Competition: Copulation, Masturbation, and Infidelity. I also recommend Promiscuity : An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition.
